My Favourite Spoof Papers

“The Earth is round, p<0.05”

Academia has a long and storied tradition of publishing joke papers. Sometimes these are hoax papers designed to expose the low academic standards of a field, such as in the Sokal affair. Other times they make a serious point in an exaggerated or humorous fashion. There is also the practice of giving funny names to papers, which frankly has gotten a bit tiresome.¹ There are also plenty of serious papers about inherently funny topics. Below are my favourite papers I’ve found where the content itself is a spoof. A lot of spoof “papers” were either rejected or never submitted to proper academic journals in the first place, but as far as I know, all of these papers were published in real academic journals.

The Phillips curve is an economic trade-off between inflation and unemployment, and Japan’s Phillips curve looks like Japan.

‘A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coathors’ by Goodman, Goodman, Goodman, and Goodman.

‘Can a Good Philosophical Contribution be Made Just by Asking a Question?’. That’s it. That’s the whole paper.

‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer's Block”’. Again, that’s the whole paper.

A randomised control trial on whether deploying your parachute makes you more likely to survive jumping out of a plane. I think the point here is to get people to think more clearly about under what conditions an RCT is actually useful or helpful. 

“I offer this page, with the following conclusion: If you have been directed to this page by a citation elsewhere, it is plainly true that the author’s claim is correct.”

There is a whole cottage industry of papers “proving” that the Earth is flat, or round, as a way to expose the perils of using frequentist statistics, such as ‘The Earth is Round, p<0.05’.

Paul Krugman’s theory of interstellar trade: “This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics”

An epidemiology paper which concludes that, if liking Justin Bieber were a disease, then “Bieber fever” would be one of the most virulent infections in history. 

‘The Effect of Having Christmas Dinner with In-Laws on Gut Microbiota Composition.’

The Einstein-Murphy interaction: “We show that toast does indeed have an inherent tendency to land butter-side down for a wide range of conditions.”

1. I will make an exception for ‘Fantastic Yeasts and Where to Find Them’.